Christians and Jews—Same Boat, Same Sharks

Would you care to guess how many Iraqi Christians and Yazidis died during Obama’s 4-hour White House love fest with Moslem leaders?

The topic was the manufactured crisis of Islamophobia in the United States. (According to the FBI, each year, there are four times as many anti-Semitic incidents as attacks on Moslems, physical or verbal.) The White House meeting came on the heels of Obama’s imperious lecture at the National Prayer Breakfast, where the congregant of Rev. Wright’s Church of Liberation Theology ragged on Christians who think their faith is somehow superior to the religion of jihad.

Sure, there are dozens of terrorist groups running around the world slaughtering tens of thousands every year in the name of Allah, but what about the Crusades, Obama asked? Yeah, and how about slave owners in the ante-bellum South who used the Bible to justify their peculiar institution?

The president was in rare form – but then, when is he not, when it comes to slobbering over Islam and sneering at Christians and Jews.

Recently, Obama referred to the terrorist attack following the Charlie Hebdo killings as one in which gunmen “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” Presumably, the terrorist Keystone Cops just blundered into a kosher deli, without intending to kill Jews. (Under pressure, the White House immediately backed away from that absurdity.) But that’s how bizarre the president’s rationalizations of Islamic violence have become.

Jews are often accused of caring only for their own. (In the case of Jewish liberals, that would be caring for everyone but their own.) To the contrary, Rabbi Hillel the Elder taught us, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But he went on, “If I am only for myself, who am I?”

In the spirit of Hillel, I stand with a group targeted for extinction – persecuted Christians in the Moslem world.

While those at the White House meeting were decrying the horror of opposition to mega-mosque construction, throughout the Islamic world, churches are going up in flames, and Christians are murdered, tortured, crucified, raped, kidnapped, and driven from their ancestral homes for the unpardonable offense of polluting Moslem lands with their presence. “Religion of peace” is among history’s more ironic descriptions.

The 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative sent a delegation to Iraq, January 21-28. Its just released report begins by noting that in 1948, there were 150,000 Jews in Iraq. (Many fled to Israel after the establishment of the Jewish state. Others were driven out.) All that remains is 10 elderly Jews. In the last decade, Iraq’s Christian community declined from 1.5 million to 300,000, at least half of them displaced persons.

ISIS is working on the rest.

The delegation collected eyewitness accounts. Their report paints a chilling picture. In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State overran the cities of Mosul and Tikrit and declared its blood-drenched caliphate. The report notes: “Christians were ordered to leave lands that had been their homes for thousands of years. Those remaining behind were issued a stark choice, convert to Islam, pay the Jizya tax or die.”

The Yazidi are an ancient monotheistic people who live in Iraq’s Nineveh province. The report discloses: “Yazidi men were killed and captured and Yazidi women and children were sold, raped and tortured.” In one case, a 3-year-old child was snatched from her mother’s lap to be raised as a Moslem.

In Mosul, an 800-year-old church was turned into a torture chamber. Another that existed for 150 years was used as a prison. Crosses and statues were systematically smashed. The Bishop of Mosul asks: “Does the American government recognize the thousands of years of heritage displaced in one day? (With Obama in charge, he must be kidding.) Do the media cover the burning of the churches? This is not just the end of Christianity, but the end of our ethnicity who have lived here for thousands of years. We believe this is genocide.”

In an incident not covered by the report, Reverend Andrew White, an Anglican priest who’s called the Vicar of Baghdad, said ISIS fighters surrounded a group of Christian children (all under 15), who were told to pledge their allegiance to Mohammed. Instead, as Father White relates, the children said, “No, we love Jesus.” After repeated demands and refusals, their heads were cut off. White: “How do you respond to that? You just cry…. That’s what we have been going through. That’s what we are going through.”

Yes, but what about Godfrey of Bouillon, the president indignantly inquires?

Even Britain’s Prince Charles (who’s been an apologist for Islam in the past) can’t close his eyes to reality forever. “It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are being targeted by fundamentalist Islamic militants (a word combination Obama would never employ) .” Christianity’s roots are in that part of the world. “Yet today the Middle East and North Africa has the lowest concentration of Christians in the world – just 4% of the population…”

While ISIS has streamlined the process, a genocidal war on Christians is going on throughout the Islamic world.

It’s estimated that in the first half of 2014 alone, Boko Haram (which is fighting to establish Sharia law throughout Nigeria) killed more than 2,000. On April 14-15, 2014, it kidnapped 219 school girls. Most have been converted to Islam, many forced to marry terrorists, some taken to other countries or used as bargaining chips. The Obama administration isn’t taking this lying down. On her official Twitter account, there’s a picture of First Lady Michelle holding a sign that reads “Bring Back Our Girls.” They decapitate. We Tweet.

• On Sunday, ISIS’s Libyan franchise released a video that purports to show the mass beheadings of Christians on a deserted beach.

And Obama thinks climate change is more of a threat than terrorism. Then again, it’s not his head on the chopping block.

When I think about Christian children beheaded, raped, sold into slavery and otherwise brutalized, I see an April 16, 1943 photo of a Jewish boy (in short pants and an oversized coat) with hands raised, being led out of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto under S.S. guns.

I see the face of an 8-year old girl killed in a 2012 attack on a Jewish day school in Toulouse, France. Her murderer caught her by the hair, changed weapons when his gun jammed, looked into her eyes and shot her in the head. The same death cult that shoots Jewish children in the head, beheads Christian children for saying they loved Jesus.

My stand is part empathy and part self-interest. The Muslim Brotherhood had a saying: “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”

When he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill telephoned FDR and told the president, “We are all in the same boat now.”

Christians and Jews are also in the same boat – circled by the same sharks.

Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.

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